


In The Best of All Possible Worlds

by rokhal



Series: Episode tags invalidated by canon [11]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Reverse Angst, Sam Finds Out, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 12:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Obviously, this will not happen, as our beloved Show is far from the best of all possible worlds. But this is one way Sam might find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In The Best of All Possible Worlds

Dean was in the War Room, poking at the light-up map and Googling news in all the angel touch-down sites, when he heard Sam’s boots clumping in from the hallway. He turned, wary—Sam took vindictive joy in ambushing him with anthologies of paranormal activity and religious practices to read—and tensed, hands rolling into fists.

That was Zeke at the wheel. Zeke wore Sam like a ten-year-old kid wore his dad’s suit jacket, with a ludicrous awkwardness that left Dean goggling that Zeke had walked Sam out of the hospital unnoticed, hands hanging stiffly, feet and shoulders trailing every which way as though forgotten, emotion clumsily puppeteered through Sam’s open face. Zeke was unmistakable. So was his alarm. He’d better be alarmed, if Dean was going to be left explaining to Sam how he’d gotten from the library to the war room and lost five whole minutes.

Or maybe Zeke could make it so Sam wouldn’t wonder about the missing minutes. Dean’s fear and anger bubbled harder in his chest.

“It better be good—” Dean started, but Zeke interrupted him, bumbling to the light-up map and half-collapsing against its edge.

“You must tell him,” Zeke gasped. “Convince him our actions were to the good, or Sam’s ignorance will kill us both.”

 

_Earlier . . ._

Sam had been feeling pretty good since quitting the Trials. He’d stopped coughing blood almost overnight. The fevers were gone. He was keeping food down again. These might reasonably be expected, given that he’d stopped taking destructive purifying cosmic energy into his body and assuming that the worst of his symptoms had been magical in origin.

But more than that, his back and knees felt better than they had since he’d been a teenager or since Lucifer had possessed him. The air smelled brighter. The light was richer. Scent and taste were more vibrant. He could concentrate better; it was as if a gray film had been washed from the windshield of his mind. He’d been down last year, suicidal if he wanted to get technical, but he couldn’t resurrect that despair, and stranger still, he didn’t want to. He felt reborn.

At first he’d assumed it was because he was pure now, that this was what his emotional landscape would have been without Azazel’s poison changing him from infancy, but that was before the vanishing injuries, before Dean’s caginess, before the odd looks from the demons and sensitives they encountered, before Dean had supposedly slaughtered four demons wearing special-ops corpsmen with only a knife. Dean was hiding something, something that changed Sam, got under his skin, suppressed his anxiety, improved his stamina and healing rate, and that killed demons.

Handily, Dean had caught a demon and convinced Sam to keep him in their dungeon from the day the Trials had ended.

He hadn’t entertained the idea seriously for the first few weeks after he’d thought of it. The signs didn’t add up. He hadn’t been craving. Demon blood didn’t explain the odd black-out. The euphoria he was floating in didn’t have the particular bite that demon blood brought—it was an “everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds” feeling, not a “damn the world and damn everyone in it because I am the baddest mofo on the face of the earth” feeling. And most of all, Sam couldn’t fathom Dean doing that to him. Slipping him blood. Pushing him back onto his drug of choice. Dean wouldn’t do that. Not after all Sam had suffered to get free of it. Dean wouldn’t turn him back into a vampire.

But then, Sam had realized, Dean had no problem with Benny Lafitte.

So. Working theory: Dean was slipping Sam Crowley’s blood, small amounts, regularly, and using some kind of adjunct spell from the depths of the Bunker’s archives to keep the withdrawal symptoms at bay and give the euphoria a less demonic flavor. Maybe he was covering his tracks with an amnesia spell; that would explain the blackouts, and god knew the Men of Letters had enough versions of _Oblivio_ floating around for unscrupulous brothers to find. Sam had yet to find an example of the first spell or an amnesia spell whose materials could be carried around in someone’s pocket, but he wasn’t counting out Dean Winchester luck.

If the theory bore out—if Sam had been purified, and now he wasn’t—he wasn’t sure what he’d do. To Dean, to himself—he’d been ready to die. He wasn’t anymore, not at the moment, but that was the euphoria. Quasi-suicidal might not be Sam’s right mind, or even his preferred state of mind, but it was his own mind, last he’d been in it, and for Dean to take that from him—Sam cut this thought off, because while he might not feel especially angry at the moment, demon blood and resentment were explosive.

He discarded his first thought of stripping Crowley and examining him for injuries. Ruby’s skin had always looked whole; demons could hold their host bodies together so tightly the damage was undetectable. No, even if Crowley had been losing blood, the question was where the blood had gone.

Was it in Sam?

In the dungeon hidden behind two rolling shelves of boxed correspondence and journals, Crowley sat, chained, never eating or drinking or sleeping or pissing, but breathing their air and exuding notes of sweat, sulfur, and designer aftershave. Sam opened the door of the records room and stood in the dark antechamber, listening. Crowley knew he was there. There would be a sliver of dim light from the hallway slipping between the shelves, over or under the false doors; there would be the faint scuff of the tight doorjam and the soles of Sam’s boots; perhaps Crowley could hear Sam’s breath whistling in his nose from where he sat in the darkness. Crowley liked to greet Sam and Dean with a quip on his tongue, a show of bravado, as if they were green enough to buy a demon’s acting. But now Crowley was silent. Crowley was a rabbit crouching in a meadow kidding himself the hawk overhead would glide away. Dean wasn’t here to put on a show for. And demons feared Sam.

Time’s up, Sam thought. He readied himself, taking a slow centering breath. His powers waited, quiescent like the muscles that wiggled his ears, hazardous as a live wire. Stretching out power without a good jigger of demon blood in his system to grease up the works was an instant incapacitating migraine, and the memory of the pain alone was enough to make Sam edgy, not to mention what it would mean about Dean. He couldn’t feel anything in his gas tank, either. But maybe that was part of the hypothetical spell that was holding off the cravings.

“Could we at least _talk_ about this,” Crowley hissed from the other side of the shelves, the crouching rabbit stamping its hind foot. Sam dug deep, stretched out his hand like Darth Vader, and leaned out.

The migraine thundered through him. But unlike every time he’d clawed at a demon underfuelled in the past, the migraine didn’t hold him back.

Exorcising demons was like diving headfirst out of his body, burrowing into the space between demon and host, picking them apart with teeth and tongue, breathing their fear, throat to throat and lips to heart, drawing the demon out with an effort that was half scraping, half swallowing, bizarre and revolting and exhilarating; Sam burrowed deep into Crowley, and his head swum with agony that would ordinarily snap him dizzy and sickened back into his own skull, but this time, though the agony mounted, Sam could still work. His soul was buzzing and his inner vision swam with strange lights, and the power stuck and jangled and shrieked as he spooled it away, but it fed him, it sustained him through the exorcism. He prized and nuzzled and tore until Crowley boiled loose from his host, then pulled, gently, slowly, testing his strength against that of the King of Hell. Somewhere behind him, Sam’s head felt like it was imploding. But there was power in his gas tank. Though Crowley latched himself in and struggled with all his might, Sam’s well of power was too strong, and in the instant before Sam lost consciousness, the air of the records room was perfumed with the smoke of Hell.

 

_Now . . ._

“If he continues to tap my grace, I will become weakened, so depleted that I would have no choice but to feed from your brother’s soul, itself far too fragile for such use. I cannot redact Sam’s memory forever. His power leaves pockets of his mind inaccessible to me and the scars on his soul conceal his thoughts; his investigation will repeat itself. I stopped him before he could do us more damage, but this cannot happen again. You must tell him.”

Zeke gave Dean a second or two for the panic to set in before he ducked into the background in a flash of white, leaving Sam seated at the long table, blinking at Dean. He massaged his temple, puzzled, and scanned the room, the books on the table, his hands. “I must’ve . . . _seriously_ spaced,” he muttered. “Uh. You were saying?”

Dean stared at him for a long moment, trying to unstuck his bone-dry throat and hide the shaking in his hands. “Sam,” he began steadily, a good open-ended start. “You remember that time I forged Dad’s signature for your caveman museum field trip? You had fun, right?”

“I think remember Dad flipping out about me being out of your sight for a day—ninety-seven? Oregon?” Sam swallowed, absorbing Dean’s nerves by osmosis. “I had to run four blocks every morning for a week. What about it?”

“Just setting the tone. Sam—promise me. I gotta tell you something. And it’s really important that you not freak out.”

“You only tell someone that when there’s a real good reason they should freak out,” said Sam warily.

“Promise me anyway.”

“Promise what?”

“ _Yoga_ , Sam. Calm. Be very calm. No panicking, no punching me in the face—okay, you can punch me in the face if it helps keep you calm, but don’t freak out.”

Sam’s skin paled with resignation and horror. “Have you been slipping me demon blood?” he whispered.

“Uh— _no._ But. See, you were brain-dead after the trials, and I got a little . . . creative . . .”

 

_Later . . ._

 “Why am I not punching you right now?” Sam hissed across the table at Dean, fists balled at his sides.

“Because we’re calm and rational adults and Zeke might be riding the brakes on your fight-or-flight—”

“Well, tell him to cut it the fuck out!” Sam bellowed, but there was no flash of unvesseled angel in the Bunker, and when Sam did punch Dean in the face, he got him an icepack later.

Then he emptied all the trash cans in the Bunker onto the floor in Dean’s room, hid Dean’s eight-track collection, and finally sewed a voodoo doll out of one of Dean’s shirts and attacked it with a Sharpie, because if Dean was going to invite dicks into Sam’s brain, then Sam was tattooing dicks on Dean’s face.

But Sam remained alive, grudgingly accepting Zeke’s repair work, because he was a calm and rational adult.


End file.
